On Philosophy and the Sciences in Antiquity

Robert Sharples’ Philosophy and the Sciences in Antiquity 1 collects the papers delivered at a colloquium at University College London in 2003. No matter how precisely the organizer defines the subject to which such a colloquium is dedicated, the collected papers that emerge from it rarely add up to a unified whole; contributors go their own ways, sometimes with scarcely a nod to the theme that was intended to unify their efforts. The title ‘Philosophy and the Sciences in Antiquity’ is enormously capacious, and in itself points to no integrated set of questions and no one line of enquiry, so that readers looking for a cohesive treatment of a single theme may well come to it—in the words of Sydney Smith—‘with no very lively hope of success’.